An integrated process for game balancing

Game balancing is a recurring problem that currently requires a lot of manual work, usually following a game designer's intuition or rules-of-thumb. To what extent can or should the balancing process be automated? We establish a process model that integrates both manual and automated balancing approaches. Artificial agents are employed to automatically assess the desirability of a game. We demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the model and analyze the resulting solutions from its application to a simple video game.